One thing many people know about me is I love a good argument. Not only do I feel like that is where I learn the most but I also seem to do fairly well at making a case and debating it.
What I’ve never been good at though is remembering things. Stats, dates, faces, names, history, geography….all of it, I just am not skilled in the art of retaining information. I can watch a movie or read a book and go back to it a year later and it’s like reading doing it all over again. Rachel can listen to a 12 hour podcast (like a Hardcore History one) and repeat it back to you with vivid detail. I can’t remember the basic premise.
This got me thinking tonight that I probably make up for my lack of knowledge by arguing. I realize that knowledge is crucial to making a good argument. But you don’t need a ton of knowledge to be able to pull apart someone else’s. So I probably gravitate to situations where I can pick apart arguments and point out fallacies more so where I’m left to defend strictly my right point of view by lists of facts and evidence.
This is the typical deconstructionist stance. We are wonderful at pointing out the flaws in the institutions, systems and beliefs around us but we aren’t very good at articulating our own. So we end up staying stuck in this world of just unpacking everyone else’s wrong views rather than constructing our own. It’s hard work to construct your own view. It takes discipline and focus, something I lack. I constantly am distracting myself by reassuring myself that I’m not wrong like those other people and I can prove it. It’s probably best that I start getting to the hard work of discipline and actually learning rather than just riding of the coattails of other people’s failure.
Wait, we’ve been arguing all these years only for you to have this conclusion.
You say the deconstructionist is not good at formulating his/her own perspective. I say that once that effort or method is abandoned he or she is no longer a deconstructionist. Is this the goal?